Billy Bishop lived exposed to the elements and often hungry for years.

”I look at this whole situation and I still feel that homeless feeling even after 10 years, the hurt; it doesn’t go away. I can see those people in the woods. Many of them have died. They’re still going to die in there.

“They called us the worst of the worst. But was I? I had hate in my heart because I was drinking and that changes the way your mind works, but I didn’t steal, I didn’t cause any harm.”

Bishop, who helped found Homeless Not Hopeless housing, says things have changed for the better. “Fifteen hundred people were homeless 20 years ago. One year 22 people died. Yes, only 10 died this year, but then what is a human life worth?”

Looking around Baldwin Hall at Federated Church of Hyannis Dec. 21, Bishop said, “You people here have made a world of difference.”

He was addressing other speakers and supporters at a press conference held on National Homeless Persons Memorial Day. Another of those gathered to highlight the issue was Alan Burt, president of the Cape and Islands citizens advisory board for the state Department of Mental Health. Burt said it is through the suffering of the homeless that God speaks.

Rick Presbrey, CEO of Housing Assistance Corp. since its 1974 founding, said 436 human beings passed through its NOAH shelter this year. He said many stay a week or less, and 49 percent stay between eight and 100 nights, with about half of those from eight to 30 days. A fraction pretty much live there all year. Some are families, some are teens, some elders. Some are substance abusers, some mentally ill, some disabled, some are vets.

Others vulnerable to homelessness are renters, according to Paula Schnepp, coordinator of the Barnstable County Regional Network to Address Homelessness. She said 44 percent of low-income households who rent pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, and can be evicted from between 30 to 90 days. (Indeed, one in four people on the Cape “are under 200 percent of the poverty level," leaving thousands of people on the edge, she warned.) New affordable housing in Barnstable took six years to build and had 20 applications per unit. Solutions: raising the minimum wage, more housing.

[This writer agrees. My mother and I might have been homeless save for the mercy of affordable housing.]

Heidi Nelson, CEO of Duffy Health Care Center, which serves “medical and clinical needs” of the most vulnerable, said, ”Poor health causes homelessness and homelessness causes poor health. Life expectancy is shortened.” Nelson said chronically homeless numbers are falling because of federal and local services, but more are needed.

Burt commented that cuts to health and housing come in hard economic times, such as the $100 million he said the state Department of Mental Health lost.

“In fact,” state Sen. Dan Wolf stressed, “there is enough money to go around.” Flying over New York’s Westchester County, he saw that “the guesthouses were large enough to fit my home into.” He said we need to give “civic expression of our collective will” by limiting the special interests and corporations that control our lives. “It’s time to take it to the streets,” he said, to demand reformation of the tax code and pressure representatives to allocate money for what is important.

“The mainstream is now aware of income inequality,” Wolf said. “Our beautiful capitalist economy needs to be generative and productive, not destructive and extractive.”

Jeff Howell, president of Homeless Not Hopeless, said he wished headlines could read: ”People of Cape Cod Spend Holiday Money on Giving” whether to HAC, Homeless not Hopeless or others, instead of consuming and buying that last gift.

Solutions are tri-part: from the private, the sacred, and government, according to the Rev. Larry Brown, vice chairman of the Cape Cod Interfaith Coalition. “I’ve seen a huge shift in the nature of the American people,” he said, such that an executive recently interviewed on TV would actually prefer to see “poor people starving to death than have the government give them food stamps.” We must return to “taking pride in taking care of our own," he said. "We need better human beings.”

Deacon Dick Murphy of Homeless Not Hopeless agreed, “Not only do we need to keep our fellow human beings, safe, warm and fed, but we need the extra ingredient of love. People need spirituality and love to feel that they matter.”

Presbrey observed that people rebuilding their lives also need something meaningful to do every day.

Attendees, including Barnstable Town Council President Deborah Dagwan, would share the night outdoors with the homeless in Brewster to understand their suffering.

“Perhaps,” said Steve Brown of Commonwealth Solutions, “the light of the stars from a billion years ago will reach us tonight.”